Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [74]
It wasn't always miserable scenery and boredom. In fact, the city that the traveler dreams of was still largely intact as recently as thirty years ago. When I asked the art collector David Kidd why he chose to live in Japan, he told me the story of his arrival in Kyoto in 1952: it was Christmas Eve, and snow was falling on tiled roofs and narrow streets lined with wood-latticed shops and houses. It was a dreamlike evening, quiet, a scene from an ink painting. Kyoto worked its magic. That magic had entranced pilgrims for centuries, and was celebrated in scrolls and screens, prints and pottery, songs and poetry. The haiku poet Basho sighed, «Even when in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto.» With its refined architecture shaped by the tea ceremony and the court nobility, and its many crafts of weaving, paper-making, lacquer, and others, Kyoto was regarded by people around the world as a cultural city on a par with Florence or Rome.
In the last months of World War II, the U.S. military command decided to remove Kyoto from the air-raid list. Although Kyoto was a major population center of some strategic importance, the State Department argued that it was more than just a Japanese city-it was a treasure of the world. As a result, old Kyoto survived at the end of the war, a city of wooden houses, its streets lined with bamboo trellises. The first thing an arriving visitor saw as a train pulled in was the sweeping roof of Higashi Honganji Temple, like a great wave rising out of the sea of tiled roofs.
To the eyes of city officials, however, this sea of tiled roofs was an embarrassment, a sign to the world that Kyoto was old and impoverished. They felt the need to prove to the world that the city was «modern,» and in order to do this, at the time of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, the city administration arranged for the construction of Kyoto Tower, a needle-shaped, garish, red-and-white building erected beside the railroad station. Hundreds of thousands of residents petitioned against this building, but the city government pushed the project through. It was a symbolic stake through the heart.
Kyoto's history since then has been one long effort to sweep away its past. Thirty-five years later, most of its old wooden houses have been torn down and replaced with shiny tile and aluminum. I have seen ancient gardens flattened, historic inns bulldozed, and mansions as gorgeous as any French chateau razed. The city of Kyoto legislates only the most primitive protection of old neighborhoods, and the national tax bureau allows almost no incentives for protecting historic properties. The destruction goes on as these words are being written. The Kyoto art dealer Morimoto Yasuyoshi tells me that when he takes coffee at a shop on the corner of Kita-Oji and Kawaramachi streets, he sees trucks driving by laden with rubble from demolished old houses almost daily.
In June 1997, my friend Mason Florence (the author of Kyoto City Guide) and I took a week off to drive one of those trucks ourselves, loaded with timbers from an Edo-period kura (storehouse) in the heart of the old city. Its owners were tearing it down to replace it with a new house, and they gave the wooden framework to me and my friends. We took it up to Iya Valley, on the island of Shikoku, where it sits in storage; one day we will rebuild it next to the farmhouse Mason and I own there. In 1998, Mason salvaged another truckload of beautiful old beams and sliding doors from the wreckage of one of Kyoto's largest traditional inns. But Mason's saving material from these old buildings is an exception, for by and large the owners of old structures in Kyoto simply